Feedback on the State of Minions in POE2 (Itemisation, Crafting, Performance and "feel")
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Minion Issues
As someone who dedicates a vast amount of time toward exploring Minion Builds in POE2, I have some concerns about the long-term viability and usability of Minions as an archetype. I've collected a few of my thoughts below... hopefully you find them useful. = Minion Itemization = Presently, for minion players, there is only a single viable scaling option for all minion skills: +Levels. While I don't think +Levels being the most powerful and valuable affix is necessarily bad, when compared to other possible affixes on our only Minion-specific gear piece (Sceptres) all other affixes provide almost no noticeable benefit. Crit mods, flat damage mods, aps mods all provide such low value comparatively that a good Sceptre has only 2 truly relevant mods: Levels and (in most cases) Spirit. Even something like 105% increased minion damage (a very low weighting mod) will typically provide ~15-20% more damage in high investment builds, while +4 Levels will provide around 60% more damage and ALSO significantly increase minion survivability (and in some cases lower spirit costs if breakpoints are reached). This is exacerbated by the incredibly limited options for scaling minions on other gear slots. Attack and Caster builds can find additional sources of damage on Rare Rings, Amulets, Gloves, Focus's, Quivers, and Helmet Crit mods. While the Minion Archetype shares the availability of +Levels on Amulets, and gets +Levels on Helmet (and recently +2 on Focus from an incredibly hard-to-hit desecration), we have incredibly restrictive gearing requirements. This leads to a couple of issues: Potential offensive upgrades are ultimately limited to your Sceptre or very rare unique items. Once you have a +2 helmet and a +3 amulet, there are no realistic incremental upgrades. Other archetypes can chase incremental upgrades to many other gear slots Because of the restrictive nature of the upgrades, and the rarity of the desired mods, they end up having highly inflated prices in trade, and are very difficult to pursue in SSF environments. Potential multiplicative scaling potential is MUCH lower than other archetypes. While they can reach godlike levels of power, deleting bosses instantly and clearing content like fully prepared temples, minion players have no possibility of reaching that level of power regardless of investment. To be clear: Minions are completely viable for completing all content in the game with the possible exception of the most juicy temple layouts. Potential Solutions: Increase options for minion itemisation. This could either be in the form of minion-specific bases like the Bone Rings in POE1 or a Minion Focus, etc., or the addition of minion-related mods on existing gear. While this would provide additional power to all minion builds, they currently find themselves at the bottom of the ladder on the power curve at high investment and would unlikely find themselves beating out existing builds even with a significant boost. Improve the values on the top end of other modifiers on Sceptres that aren't Spirit or +Levels. Things like flat added physical attack damage, for instance, have a top-end value of 19-32. On a Skeletal Sniper, that's 10% base damage at gem level 20, or 3% base damage at gem level 30. This means even t1 flat damage is an utterly dead affix as you scale gem levels, which is non-negotiable given the survivability and damage gained. This should never be the case for a t1 affix that isn't obvious filler (I do understand the importance of dead modifiers). = General Minion Performance = Minion Players run into a few significant issues when it comes to the "feel" of the archetype. We typically have to move much slower due to minions lagging behind and having delayed damage application, "Hitbox Crowding" limiting the damage application of melee minions, persistent bugs (Storm Mages Arc not hitting enemies at maximum targeting range and fizzling) and temporary minions being outranged and deleted. This has led to the only competitive minion builds relying either on exploiting weapon swapping to reposition minions, or utilising highly specific minions with very high movement speed/gap closing abilities. While I am 100% behind the idea of making Minion play a more interactive, less walking simulator archetype, I think the mark has been missed here. Command Skills either feel too niche, or too much like utility on standard minions. So I'm not doom'ing nonstop here, I will say the Pounce Wolf build that came about this league felt great. It was active, fast, had a huge difference in performance based on skill/player input. Overall, a Big W. The combination of a much lower ceiling on potential damage and clear speed, alongside minion survivability issues in juiced content and the aforementioned itemisation issues leads to an overall much less enjoyable experience than blasting around on a Rhoa with a bow, or blowing up entire screens with Grenades, or unleashing devastating one shot slams with melee, or unleashing a barrage of high impact spells... overall it just (in general) doesn't "feel" as good as other archetypes. There have been many calls for a Convocation ability akin to POE1, though I feel like this would be a band-aid fix. This is a much harder problem to address, and I think that there isn't one easy fix. It's probably a ton of small tweaks to AI, minion stats, items, skills... so I don't have much to offer other than my thoughts here. Some Suggestions: A movement speed support gem for minions. There are many minions that MIGHT be performant if they weren't so goram slow. A general movement speed "boost" that allows your minions to move in front of your direction of travel (Living Lightning does this because it's so fast) when they aren't actively in combat. This might make temporary minions and skeletal minions more viable as they won't always be behind you. Something to allow melee minions to "Squeeze" or have extended range when engaging enemies = Crafting = This one is short: We have 1 essence. At least it applies a useful, relevant modifier. Alongside hopeful improvements to the value of the various sceptre modifiers, perhaps a pass on some of the essences applying more modifiers to sceptres? Sceptres have a single (One) desecrated suffix. Nothing tagged for the Lichs, no prefixes, no options. Surely we could see some valuable additions here, especially seeing as the Lichs have many minion-related mods on other pieces, and are themed as the leaders of abyssal hordes. = Conclusion = There are also a bunch of persistent bugs, but a cursory glance over the bug report forum shows that most of them that spring to mind immediately have been reported. I understand development time is ultimately limited, and that some bugs are just really hard to chase down. I've been having a great deal of fun playing POE2, and I'm excited for the future of the game. I just feel that presently the minion archetype feels a little light on the "project build" potential, being played for extensive amounts of time to perfect a character, and their diversity of itemisation, and I feel like even a small investment in devtime could result in a dramatically improved experience for the whole archetype. Hopefully, you find this helpful. Last bumped on Jan 22, 2026, 5:11:06 AM
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I'm a pure-minion player too, and yeah - I basically agree with all of this. The "build puzzle" right now is almost comically straightforward.
When I first rolled minions, my entire checklist was: - +levels - +spirit - -reservation% And then... that's basically it. You can sprinkle in some spice with niche interactions (like converting lightning to chaos, or rings that push everything into chaos), but it's still not exactly advanced theorycrafting. It's more like "add sauce, serve". What I'd personally like to see isn't minion movement speed, it's minion aggression. Make them: - pick targets faster - acquire targets from further away - and actually move ahead of me instead of rubber-banding behind like I'm walking a pack of distracted toddlers Yeah, I get it, "walk ahead of the player" is hard because the game can't mind-read where I'm about to go. But you don't need mind-reading, you just need better default behavior. If I'm moving forward and nothing is in combat, minions should be biased to scout in front, not queue up behind me like we're waiting for a bus. More than anything, I want the fantasy to feel like "commanding an army" instead of "leading an army". I'm picking minions because I want them to take initiative and delete stuff while I focus on positioning and decisions, not because I want to personally escort them into every fight. And if someone immediately goes "but that would be too OP" - cool, then tune it. Lower minion life, make them die more often, increase resummon pressure, whatever. That's balance. But the current baseline behavior feels like the archetype is being held back by caution rather than design. |
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Minions seems like gold boy collectors.... Never in front line. Always behind following the char's shadow. And when the char desides to hit any threatening, there's a delay in taking responsibility actions.
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The worst part about minions is the spirit cost. 60 spirit for one Quarila that even with latest buffs can't decrease Boss life in 50 hits.
Tell me why the heck should i spent so much spirit for nothing??? Oh i forgot.The 10% damage absorbsion is the only thing!! |
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I remember how Necromancer's Minions in D2 kicked monster ashes and it makes me willing to return two decades back becouse now Dev's of every game just joking us. And 30 spirit for only one skeleton?? Normally with 30 spirit i should had allowed to have minimum 3 skeleton.
But no. Minion skeleton is mented for mages only. Everything is done for mages. A mage with 40 fk minions. This is not a Minion army guys, this is earth's population.... |
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" Most maps are tunnels anyway. There are 2 ways to go |
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" If you allowed to have 3 minions per 30 spirit then don't wonder if mages reaching 100 minions per player. The problem is the max limit of minions. Becouse now the are many but with stupid AI. We want max 6 but rock hard! |
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" idk about the other parts but i fully agree with this part: " same goes for poe1 btw, minions are always behind u for no reason. |
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Aggression is kind of a fun idea.
In many games, minions are a bit boring to play as it's just idling while minions do the work. It's a lot more active in PoE2 which is good. But regardless - one thing I've often mused about is that games like this could really play around more with modifiers to AI behavior. Goes for monsters, too: We've pretty limited monster behavior at the moment and it'd be interesting if say, "dump" monsters just beelined towards the player and got stuck on each other; smarter monsters might try to encircle a player. Etc. There's some behavior, e.g. ranged monsters may try to maintain range, some monsters dash at you and retreat. For minions, things like adding aggression or so would be interesting! It might be too much development work and can be hard to find a programmer in NZ who wants to work on PoE2 and has the skills needed for more advanced AI behaviors, but I think it could be kinda cool too if there was a general "intelligence" modifier on minions. Higher intelligence -> less clumping, better ability to encircle targets and to prioritize targets, etc. Could go really far with that, like at some point on specific intelligence modifiers minions might try to run away if they are on low health. And you could limit the amount of different kinds of modifiers needed. For example - two modifiers, "aggression intelligence" and "survival intelligence" could be enough. If a player wants their minions to die so they e.g. explode, then they might want more aggression intelligence than survival intelligence. And if players primarily want the minions to stay alive, they'd prioritize survival intelligence. Last edited by tzaeru#0912 on Jan 19, 2026, 6:11:57 AM
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" Max limit or not i don't care. Spirit cost is insane. Why Devs raised the spirit cost from 20 to 30? Becouse they want minions to be playable only with mage class. Great GGG!!! There is no build diversity ofcourse... |
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